God Be with Zee

"When Friday comes, we'll all call rats fish

We'll call it all forgotten when we're done"

Rasputina - Rats

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"He must be taught to take off his shoes in a mosque and to wear his hat in a synagogue and to cover his nakedness when taboo requires it, or our tribal shamans will burn him for deviationism."

Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land

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"witchcraft to many of us is absurd only on the same ground that our grandfathers’ gigs are absurd.  It is felt preposterous to think of spiritual agencies in connection with ragged beldames soaring on broomsticks, in an age when it is known that mediums of communication with the invisible world are usually unctuous personages dressed in excellent broadcloth, who soar above the curtain-poles without any broomstick, and who are not given to unprofitable intrigues [...] At present, doubtless, in certain circles, unbelievers in heavy gentlemen who float in the air by means of undiscovered laws are also taxed with atheism"

 

George Eliot - The Influence of Rationalism

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Living in a small midwestern town, I've been struggling year by year not to roll my eyes at one of the local hicks' more persistent fads: replacing "have a good day" or simple goodbyes with "have a Blessed day" 'cuz Jesus.

And a merry Shatner to you, is what I keep wanting to reply.

Initially, I felt annoyed at yet another intrusion by superstitious nonsense into daily life. Annoyance shifted to amusement though after realizing these Tweedledumbs don't seem to remember they're crusading against their own superstition. The formulaic "good-bye" started as a mere concatenation of "god be with you" so we're all already telling each other to have god-blessed days, every day.

 

The phrase never lost its meaning. The meaning was forgotten because it was meaningless in the first place, lacking any real phenomenon to describe. It's all hot air anyway. Replace it with "have a blessed day" and in another century everyone will be wishing each other "havleseedy" forgetting where THAT came from and a whole new generation of Christians would be up in arms to Christianize their dreadfully secular greeting formulae by replacing havleseedy with "may Saint Peter fondle you" or whatever.

It reminds me of religious dietary restrictions. Supposedly clear. In the prescriptive: eat certain stuff on certain days. In the proscriptive: don't eat certain stuff on certain days. Pretty simple, right? Except the handful of brutish, unspeakably ignorant herders who made up the initial rules to fit their own isolated corner of the Levant millennia ago obviously had no idea of the greater world or different calendars or how food availability might change with mass extinctions. So the rules for feasting and fasting keep getting reinvented and amended for every new village and continent onto which they're imposed by clerical fiat, constantly piling on new strictures and dispensations, exceptions and compromises, until they make tax forms look as simple as a yes/no question by comparison. Why Yahweh didn't foresee such problems... well, I'm sure you can go ahead and ask him that.

 

Possibly the funniest such dispensation is for new world societies who physically depend(ed) on other game to the point the church's fasting demands might cause mass starvation or more likely apostasy (which from the church's view is far worse.) Which led to papal decrees that since some mammals like beavers and capybaras spend most of their time in the water, they count as fish.

Taa-daaah! Problem solved! It's a fish fuzzillet. Chow down.

That booby fish gambit worked not because it somehow transubstantiated rodents into fish*, but because there was never any reason in the first place not to munch on the giant shaggy swamp rats on a given Friday. Well, y'know, aside from the obvious. The catholics merely cancelled an infinitesimal detail of their utterly gratuitous mountain of demands.

 

Are you noticing a pattern? The demands of the faithful are meaningless, nonsensical... but enforcement is everything. Enforcement is power. And that religious precept goes for the new mythology of social activism as well. Take pronoun policing, forcing everyone, increasingly by law, to pretend you are whatever sex you "identify" as. First of all, it won't last. You can't negate half a billion years of evolution just by twitching your nose and playing pretend. Make calling everyone "they" the law of the land and it will lose meaning. The instinct for reproductive contest will reassert itself. New formulae for discerning sexes will appear. You'll soon find the bearded theys start calling themselves deys and the breasted theys calling themselves zeys, thank you and g'b'wi'ye!

 

But making you call the new aristocracy by the royal "they" is a power-play, just like making you eat fish on Fridays. The real power the church holds lies not in the specific food dictated for Fridays, but in maintaining its authority to dictate, to prescribe and proscribe what you eat, what you wear, whom you fuck and when and by which hole, where and when you work or rest and whither you tithe. (Hint: that last one's particularly important.) Snowflakes' demands are nonsensical, but enforcing nonsense yields verifiable power. Step out of line, call someone by the wrong pronoun, voice socialist sympathies within earshot of Senator McCarthy, get caught with a wiener in your mouth on Friday, and out come the pitchforks and torches. Fanatical devotion to fashionable nonsense is a license to kill. Lysenko could never manage to multiply crop yields without fertilizers uphill both ways through the snow, but adherence to Lysenkoist orthodoxy allowed innumerable incompetents to remove their smarter and more honest competitors or critics from Soviet university ranks, by blacklisting, exile, torture, firing squad, or the intimidation which comes with all of the above.

The wokeysition is just one of an endless continuity of nonsensical beliefs serving as evangelizing pretext. They will make you eat fish, eat rats, eat a dick or eat shit and die. Crucifixes, hammers and sickles, rainbow flags, the pretext doesn't matter. The power-trip matters, and the charlatans and powermongers are the same every time regardless of their pretexts. But I'll get to that in a couple of weeks.

 

For now, may Saint Peter fondle you, each and every one.

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* At least not any more than all land-dwelling vertebrates are fish anyway, because technically the fishes' clade breaks down into paraphyletic unless they include all their descendants like tetrapods - so go ahead and chow down on hamburgers, alligator steaks and chicken nuggets for Lent, or for that matter some long-pig, just let not thine mouthparts toucheth red lobster meat.

 

edit: a couple weeks later turned into eight months later